Want the backstory?  Here’s my mixed tape of Love Songs.

When I tell him that we could be together forever, and when we pray and know it’s right, and we marry , and I can’t take my eyes and my hands off him, no one tells me how to fling my love up like a guard rail, to lay it down like a path, and build it up like a covering. I do not know that it is a territory, to paint it with graffiti and admire the art.

In our old age, he will pat my rear, take me around the world, and suffer long with me. One of us will hear the other whisper to angels. One of us will watch the other  sigh out this world’s last strained  grip and slip behind the veil into freedom. I have seen it, what God intends for me and Seth.

No one tells me to nail and spotlight this vision above my mind’s mantel, so there are days I replace it with other pictures. Our spirits argue about it. Seth wants to hang noble constitutional prints, and I want other scenes.

A man from Connamara asks me why I visit Galway. I answer poetry, and he whispers Ireland’s poets’ names in my ear and talks of them quietly as music blares. He says he can show me the island. 

Even though I do strain and say No and try to make myself unattractive, I have a new idea, a new green canvas with craggy hills and a raging sea on which to fix my eyes when Seth calls and tells me again he won’t be home. I begin to revise my future, as if the rewriting would make it better.

Even when my eyes unhinge and reattach to Seth, I do not know that with love I must constantly rehang the original art, repeatedly turn away from the version of myself that ran into the arms of another, and repeatedly deny the version of ourselves that didn’t suffer.

I see myself in the past, in love, and I tell her: re-visions are perversions. The future cannot be revised by you for improvements. It is already beautiful –  a garden, planted, watered, and bearing fruit.

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